Category: Moon

There is a daylight half moon this evening that will be waxing toward full over the next twelve days or so. It reached its highest point tonight around 7:30, which means that tomorrow evening I’ll see it there around 8:20. This will be the third lunar month I’ve watched since my diagnosis. (Oddly, my chemotherapy drug comes in twenty-eight doses.) This is the third lunar month I’ve been lying beside this window overlooking the river & when I began the robins were just establishing territories & building nests; tonight the juveniles are skittering among the lower branches while up above their elders sing their evening songs.

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Was I flooded by the life force overnight so that I could wake feeling this blissful? Or am I just high on Percocet? I slept only in bits & pieces last night, actually. Haven’t had this sort of insomnia in quite a while, but when I woke just now after sleeping an hour (from 4:00 to 5:00) I felt filled with bliss. Did the pickup (probably) with a bad muffler wake me? Can’t remember, but I was aware of it coming over the bridge & turning left onto Three Falls Road by following the sound it made downshifting for the turn then accelerating slowly up the first hill across the reservoir. The sound of that broken muffler echoing around the woods & open water & off the banks of the river made me aware how far my sense of hearing reaches, orienting me in space–at least out here in the country–on a far greater scale than my sense of sight. Even when I’m watching the moon, I tend to bring the moon down to me rather than gaining some sense of the great distance between myself & it. I make it intimate. But with the sound of a truck laboring uphill on an otherwise silent summer morning, all of space becomes intimate–“I placed a jar in Tennessee . . .”

The moon does look rather like the shiny bowl of a spoon moving toward full about five days from now. I love how it rises later each night (think about it), making me wait 50 minutes longer than the night before. Tonight’s moon marks a month since we moved a bed out into the living room so I could have the window with its view of the river & trees & sky. The next few days will be the best for moon-viewing: like some old Chinese emperor, I will be able to recline & watch the almost-full, then full moon rise slowly through the branches of the maple, before it leaps clear of the tallest tree to glide over a gap of clear sky before settling back into the trees in West. It’s a slow movie but there is a lot of action.

The robins’ dusk chorus ran from about 7:15 to 8:00 this evening. This is what might be called passive territorial singing–the birds take positions in the sunlit tops of trees, no bird nearer than around 250â€² from any other. They then run through their repertoire until, presumably, they get tired of hearing their own voices & head off to roost. Not all of them I heard this evening were necessarily males, as has been commonly thought. Recent research shows that females sing this way too.

The moon is waxing gibbous, not quiteÂ Â¾ full. It looks like it will reach its zenith tonight around 9:30, just after passing over the gap between the two biggest maple trees in the yard.